By George Jonas.

I was multitasking: rummaging in old notebooks, while listening to the news. That’s how I discovered that I had commented on last week’s news events 20 years ago.

Prescience? Time warp? No, just serendipity.

News item #1 A student defends himself against a racially motivated assault in school –and he’s suspended. Not only that, but the authorities threaten him with expulsion. Yes, the victim, not the bully. Apparently, the victim defended himself too successfully and the bully got the worst of the fight.

Victims aren’t supposed to do this. If they do, they lose their victim-status. They risk being hauled before the Unvictimlike Activities Committee.

News item #2 A mob shuts down a main thoroughfare in downtown Toronto for days to demonstrate in support of a separatist movement at the other end of the Earth. Some wave the banners of a terrorist group outlawed in Canada. No, it’s not Palestinians for Hamas this time; it’s Tamils for Tigers. The police bravely disperse — who, the obstreperous obstacles? No, rush-hour motorists trying to get to their jobs.

At this point serendipity strikes. I come across some lines in an old notebook.

“A visitor from outer space describing our place and times (I wrote in 1989) would say that our society is split into two groups: A vast, passive, compliant majority and a tiny, vociferous, militant minority.

“In contemporary Western countries most people are law abiding, civilized and mature to an extent unknown, and perhaps even unimagined, on other planets or periods. They’re civilized and mature to a fault; to the point of parody.

“Their tolerance of crime is a dramatic illustration, but they tolerate intrusions and indignities of other kinds, too. The extent to which Western citizens allow themselves to be bullied, intimidated, expropriated and regimented — internationally, nationally and even municipally — is almost without precedent.
“Even tyrannies imposed limits on themselves. The modern state imposes none. Mediaeval rulers allowed serfs some sovereignty within their own households. Subjects of contemporary serfdoms trying to assert sovereignty at home would have restraining orders slapped on them before they could say, “Father knows best!” An intruder into a serf’s hut used to be confronted with the best technology available to the serf — probably a pitchfork. If a Canadian householder confronted a burglar with the best technology available to him, chances are he’d be hauled away in handcuffs — the householder, not the burglar.

“In the Dark Ages a tenant farmer paid no more than a tithe of his income–10% — to the ecclesiastical authorities or to his liege lord. On his own land, he could build a shack or a pigsty with no reference to higher authorities. Try to build a tool shed without a permit on your own land today.

“Tyrants raiding a citizen’s home could seldom count on his ‘mature’ or ‘civilized’ compliance when robbing him of his property — to say nothing of taking control of his wife or his children. Today our tax authorities, social agencies, family courts, municipal officials, environmental, labour or ‘human rights’ boards, house-or home-breakers, muggers, rapists and other terrorists can safely rely on our quiet compliance when they hand us their hold-up notes.

“In the past, bandits, dictators, officials or seducers had to fight, at some risk to themselves, for what they can now take from our mature and civilized citizenry with a flick of a pen. Today a person who isn’t ready to hand over 50% of his income to social engineers, runs the risk, in addition to being fined or jailed, of being viewed as anti-social. And if he threatens to look askance at someone who is after his wife, or keeps a shotgun in his bedroom to make things a little tougher for the uninvited, he’ll be considered a Neanderthal.

“It’s not surprising that street crime flourishes in a climate where people run almost as great a risk of a criminal charge if they defend their property as they do if they try to take somebody else’s. Where a man is less likely to find himself before a tribunal for snatching a woman’s purse than for ‘ogling’ — that is, taking a prolonged look at her.

“The same climate that has ensured the general wimpification of the West has simultaneously given rise to a miniscule minority of hardened militants. These desperadoes, whether they’re muggers, house-invaders or political-religious-environmental-feminist-animal-rights terrorists, think nothing of stopping traffic. They’ll disrupt, threaten or mob individuals, institutions, businesses or cities to extort their demands — and the authorities give in to them.

“Our society has split into two distinct groups: A placid majority, conditioned or intimidated into believing that giving up their property, opinions, traditions or habits is a sign of maturity and civilization and a vicious minority that thinks disrupting and terrorizing peaceful citizens is a sign of commitment and justice. We’re truly reaping what we have sown.”
Ronald Reagan was still president when I jotted down these notes (Brian Mulroney ran Canada). If Reagan’s America was like this, imagine what Barack Obama’s will be like.

By Conrad Black

National Post May 02, 2009.

It must be said that Barack Obama tosses out apparently feckless suggestions about important matters rather flippantly. He wants to share the wealth; told a pre-election questioner that he would raise capital gains taxes even if it reduced government revenues, out of “fairness”; and has transformed the foreign visit into an itinerant, vicarious, confessional, where he seeks expiation for his country and his own predecessors, interspersed with the exchange of unlikely gifts — an iPod to the British and Commonwealth monarch of 57 years, and the “Idiot’s Bible” of Latin American socialism from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

We will have to wait for his specific medical-care and energy proposals to be sure of what he intends, but as of now he is still proposing health care “competition,” which is a euphemism for the federal government eliminating private plans, and a movement to renewable energy sources that will be unsustainably expensive. He is still describing his proposed cash handouts to low income people as “refundable tax credits” and “tax cuts” (to people who do not pay taxes). It’s in the same category of Newspeak as that favoured by the late mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, who called his city’s public lottery a “voluntary tax.”

In his foreign tours, Obama utters and endures abuse of his country, sometimes, as in an addicts’ meeting, leading the expression of opprobrium against past U.S. policy. In particular, he implicitly states that his predecessor was nasty and unreasonable.

Admittedly, few will deny that George W. Bush was a public relations disaster. It is as difficult to imagine Roosevelt or Reagan with their mouths full of food greeting Churchill or Thatcher, as Bush did Tony Blair, “Yo Blair!,” as it is to imagine anyone throwing shoes at Eisenhower, Kennedy or Nixon. But Obama could safely allow the contrast with his predecessor to be appreciated spontaneously.

President Obama’s comparative suavity and fluency are assets for his country, and deploying them is useful. But disapproving of the use of the atomic bomb by one of his party’s most admired presidents, Harry S Truman, was an astonishing (and unjust) open goal to offer to America’s enemies.

It is not clear what possessed him to refer to America’s economic performance, which carried much of the world on its back for the last 25 years, with apology if not shame on his visit to Europe last month, while praising Europe for its social democracy. Europe’s economic torpor is one of the chief ingredients of current economic problems. Economic growth and job creation are not subjects for embarrassment, and if he conducts the United States to a replication of Europe’s sluggish to stagnant growth figures, his will be a failed presidency.

It is difficult to discern what he was doing at the Americas conference in Trinidad two weeks ago. Apart from referring to political prisoners in Cuba, he sat as mute as a suet pudding while Venezuela’s Chavez, Bolivia’s Morales, Cuba’s Raul Castro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, (stuck as if in aspic in Ronald Reagan’s description of him as “the little colonel in the green fatigues” 25 years ago), flayed the United States as the source of all Latin America’s problems.

This was long the specialty of the continent’s absurdly bemedalled, Ruritanian junta-leaders as they pillaged their countries, and of the left-wing demagogues they regularly overthrew. But good government, both from the centre-left (Brazil and Chile) and the centre-right (Colombia and Mexico), is in vogue and the practice of blaming everything on the United States is now confined to the far left. Moderate Latin American regimes have been rather cowardly about attacking the human rights records of Castro, Chavez and others. This meeting was Obama’s chance to hold their feet to the fire and shake the branches for Latin American democrats, but he let the opportunity pass.

For all America’s excesses and presumptions, there are limits to how much abuse the United States has to accept from left-wing South American regimes. Washington assisted the Latin American countries in gaining and retaining their independence, liberated Cuba from Spanish oppression, gave it the best government it has had and then gave it independence. It would have been better for everyone if it had taken Cuba in as a U.S. state a hundred years ago. The day when U.S. Latin American policy was unduly influenced by exploitative corporations ended decades ago.

Obama’s relaxation of travel and some financial restrictions is a reasonable first step in reforming America’s Cuban policy. Cuba and the other leftist states in the hemisphere are no particular threat or nuisance to the United States now. They can’t export revolution, are no longer agents for intercontinental mischief as Cuba and Nicaragua were in the piping days of the Soviet Union and Cuba is desperately short of cash. When Raul Castro replied to Obama’s conciliatory gestures by saying that everything was “on the table,” he was batted down in an Internet posting by big brother Fidel. The palsied Castro despotism has been reduced to this charade of governance. It can’t fester and infect Cuba much longer, but appears to be trying to cash in on Obama’s born-again, open-pocketed notions of good neighbourliness. There is no reason, unilaterally, to end the embargo of Cuba, though a relaxation of it, in exchange for almost anything, could be justified.

So far, while in Europe, President Obama has indicted his country and his predecessors for arrogance, dismissiveness, genocide, torture and insufficient respect for the Muslim world. Does the poor old USA really deserve this, and deserve the message to be delivered by its leader in the continent that gave the world totalitarian Communism, Nazism, Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and all the pogroms and massacres of Russia, Armenia and Bulgaria? All of these have occurred in the time that the United States has been continuously constitutionally governed by 43 elected presidents and 110 elected congresses.

Obama even disparaged the era when it was “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” deciding the fate of nations. They were the world’s greatest statesmen, at least since Lincoln, and they saved civilization from the Nazis and Japanese imperialists while Europe was governed by Hitler and Stalin, Japan by militarist gangsters and Latin America by implausibly uniformed crooks.
Many wonder where these mad discursions will end, and what their purpose is. If Obama is confusing America’s enemies and tuning up the atmospherics as only a non-white president could do, flying trial balloons and reconnoitring, it is eccentric, but not necessarily bad, statesmanship.

If what we see and hear is what we are going to get — unilateral disarmament, preemptive concessions, socialized medicine, tax increases, windmills and solar panels from sea to sea, the auto industry run by the UAW and the wholesale prosecution of Republicans on torture charges, it is indeed time for the tea parties of protest that are taking place all over America, and for the prayerful singing of patriotic anthems, in the encircling gloom, to remind Americans of what their country once was.

Obama’s victory marked by a wealth of opportunity
Posted: November 15, 2008, 10:30 AM by Kelly McParland
Conrad Black, Full Comment, U.S. Politics

Having confidently predicted the victory of John McCain, and having stuck with that until his blunderbuss campaign blew up, I will offer a few thoughts to the incoming U.S. administration. Rarely have such comments been so profoundly unsolicited. Barack Obama has ignited more excitement and positive curiosity than any incoming government leader in the world since John F. Kennedy. He starts with an immense and fervent public relations honeymoon.

As one who drove with university friends in the early and mid-Sixties for a few weeks each spring in the United States, and well remembers the racial segregation even in the North, and the idle hopelessness of the sprawling, surly, black slums of the great cities of the North and Mid-West, I can only render deep homage to the reformist conscience of America.

In my remarks published here on Nov. 5, but written before the polls had closed, I referred to Obama’s tax to soak the productive elements of the country and cash out those who do not pay taxes with the piffle of “refundable tax credits” as “Marxist” because it would enact the Marxist formula of “From each according to his means to each according to his needs.” No-frills editing seems to have left the impression with some that I was calling Obama a practising Marxist. I was not, do not, and regret the confusion.

The proportions of Obama’s victory were at the mid-point of the polls: about 52% for him to 46.5% for McCain; an unambiguous and solid victory, but not an epochal tidal wave that need presage a long or deep purgatory for the Republicans.

The president-elect appears to have a mandate to make health care more accessible and affordable, but not to discourage private medicine. The public seems to want him to regulate the financial industry more intelligently, but without strangling it in Sarbanes-esque pettifogging. The people also seem to want a higher comfort level than they have now that special interests and lobbyists do not have an unhealthy influence on the federal government; and they want improved government and public relations with America’s traditional and natural allies in Europe and the Americas. There is general recognition that infrastructure requires attention if the means can be found to do it, and there does appear to be a consensus for reduction of energy imports that will survive the usual OPEC wheeze of administering the anesthetic of tactical oil-price reductions.

There is no mandate for a substantial income tax increase, or to repeal secret-ballot trade-union votes. Any such effort will not pass and will squander the new administration’s political capital. The American people are worried, but they have not taken leave of their senses to the point of wishing to water the parched detritus of the Luddite American unionized labour movement.

Building upon my track record as a political seer, I predict help for the unemployed with a Roosevelt-style public works program that would address decaying transport and other public-services needs; a financial transaction tax to raise revenue; and some sort of non-protectionist fiscal incentive to sophisticated manufacturing.

The United States remains the world’s most technologically advanced, as well as its largest, manufacturer, but it has to stop losing factories to cheaper-labour countries, and good engineering and technology careers to the over-stuffed ant-hills of make-work in the fields of law, financial-brokerage and esoteric consulting. The government can’t start dictating careers to people, but it could incentivize certain types of specialized education of greater economic and social use to the country than others.

In addition to the acquisition of preferred shares from the treasuries of banks already happening, there should be some sort of obligatory clearinghouse for the trading of derivatives so there would be reasonable knowledge of the outstanding quantum of such instruments. Estimates of the outstanding volume of underwater real estate-backed or related assets varies from $7-trillion to a financial science-fiction figure of over $50-trillion. It is astounding that the world financial markets should be in such an uninformed state, which makes the re-establishment of confidence very difficult.

Debt-leverage in the hedge-fund industry will have to be addressed through international agreement on lending ratios in the world banking system. Alan Greenspan’s profession of faith in the spontaneous prudence of the U.S. lending banks was insane, and a fire bell in the night when he said it to the Senate Banking Committee 10 years ago. There will have to be some sort of principal-residence home refinancing plan, but this is already in the works.

The American-owned domestic auto industry should be delivered to an industrialist czar such as Lewis Gerstner (IBM) or George David (United Technologies), with a five-year unlimited mandate to produce two adequately-capitalized companies, with sensible designs, industrial relations and market targets; financed by the U.S. government as a preferred shareholder, which would then make a staged retraction from the investment. This investment would net the taxpayers huge profits.

If the president-elect is serious about bi-partisanship, his alleged invitation to Robert Gates to remain as defence secretary is a good start. So would be Cabinet invitations to Colin Powell and John McCain himself, if they can reach agreement over Iraq, as well as to Hillary Clinton, who did have almost as much support as Obama during the Democratic primaries.

It should be possible to make a bi-partisan agreement over Iraq strategy, now that the need for electoral histrionics is over. Obama could emulate Dwight D. Eisenhower, (“I will go to Korea”) and Richard Nixon, (“I have a plan” for Vietnam — he didn’t), and meet early with the Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki. Obama has complete liberty in Iraq from his voters, and can bargain from great strength. Ideally, a comprehensive agreement could be worked out, including a long-term alliance, a substantial withdrawal timetable, a payment out of accumulated surplus by Iraq for some of the U.S. financial costs of the war and a reconstruction plan in which the U.S. would build Iraq up to a modern standard as security conditions allowed, in exchange for large quantities of oil at pre-fixed prices. This would simultaneously address the current-account deficit, energy supply and Middle East stabilization problems.

Perhaps most important in this remarkable accession is that Barack Obama has moved African-Americans from reliance on the victim culture to recognition of opportunity. He is the first Western leader who can make effectively the same point internationally, to predominantly black and to Islamic countries.

In a way that even the most gifted and benign Caucasian leaders of the United States and the other western Great Powers could not, this president will be able, without appeasement or naïveté, to encourage black African and Islamic leaders and the vast masses of people behind them, to turn to a new page of genuine co-operation and away from misgovernment slightly masked by the tired platitudes of anti-colonialism. This may be what Senator Obama meant by talking to the likes of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, without, for obvious reasons, being able to elaborate on it during the late campaign.

If so, for this, and for much else, he deserves the admiration and the goodwill of all.